Synopsis

Take Shelter Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.In Lagrange, Ohio, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) has apocalyptic dreams and visual and auditory hallucinations of rain “like fresh motor oil”, swarms of menacing black birds, and being harmed by people close to him. He hides all of this from his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and their deaf daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). He instead channels his anxieties into a compulsive obsession to improve and enlarge a storm shelter in his backyard; however, his increasingly strange behavior – including a tendency to cut ties with anyone in his life that has harmed him only in his dreams – strains his relationship with his family, friends, employer, and the close-knit town. Curtis grudgingly sees a counselor at a free clinic, with whom he talks about his family’s psychological history. His mother (Kathy Baker)

suffers from paranoid schizophrenia that surfaced in her at about the same age that Curtis is now.In order to get the expanded storm shelter done, Curtis breaks work rules by using equipment from his construction job at his house and gets a home improvement loan he can ill afford to start building the shelter – all without telling his wife. Sam becomes angry when she discovers the project. After Curtis takes more than the prescribed dose of a sedative and suffers a seizure, Sam calls an ambulance. He recovers, then finally explains the truth to her, including his dreams.Curtis begins to miss more work, causing tensions with his boss, as he and Sam make preparations for the cochlear implant surgery Hannah is to undergo in six weeks’ time. Having been informed of the borrowed work equipment, Curtis’s boss fires him and gives him only two weeks’ worth of medical insurance benefits, after placing Dewart (Shea Whigham) (the close friend and co-worker whom Curtis asked to help him start construction of the shelter) on two weeks’ unpaid administrative leave.